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Rage Is Back by Adam Mansbach: Review

On the surface this new novel appears to be about black rage against white authority, though any acknowledgement or description of race is peculiarly absent from a book, that despite this theme, is filled with racial stereotypes. Indeed, the titular character, Rage, seems to be white and although the cast includes whites, blacks, Hispanics and Europeans, none of them ever seem to notice.

Rage is Back is a virtuoso stylistic performance, told in the first-person voice of adolescent Dondi, abandoned son of Rage, once the most famous graffiti artist in New York . Rage and his friends defaced so many subway trains, they’d been targeted by a stereotypical evil cop Bracken, who murdered Rage’s best friend. In retaliation Rage tagged as much of the city as he could with accusatory messages, but then felt forced to skip town, leaving his girlfriend Wren to raise Dondi by herself.

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As the book opens, Dondi has just been thrown out of school and his mother’s apartment, and is dealing drugs and couch surfing. Rumours abound that after 16 years of silence, Rage has returned to New York. This proves true, and sets in motion the plot of the book, which involves resurrecting once famous graffiti crews to perform an all-out assault on the subway system, to ensure that Bracken, by this time running for mayor, is finally defeated. The complicated web of characters and plot devices this requires is delivered in such an achingly, painstakingly constructed New York black street speak that it’s sometimes hard to understand what is being said.

And we get an exhaustive number of characters, new ones introduced even unto the final pages of the book, none of whom use their real names. Everyone takes aliases at will, changes them at will, and all of them are ridiculously precious: Ambassador Denge Fever, Cloud 9, Amuse — almost anything that’s not actually a name will do. When there are already too many characters to distinguish — especially since they all speak in that same aggressive, surreal patois — it hardly helps that they keep changing names.

Perhaps Mansbach has accurately captured the voice of these people; I wouldn’t know. But it’s so highly stylized and used so relentlessly, it quickly becomes obvious that riffing with the dialect is really what the book’s all about. It’s certainly not the plot, which is just a caper movie set in Harlem, nor the characterization, since every one of these posturing clowns simply plays out whatever role the story demands. They are all homeboys strutting around throwing their chests out at each other, swearing at each other, dropping yet more names and schooling Dondi (and the reader) in the history of graffiti crews from the 1980s. It’s pretty tiresome, actually.

And the use of blatantly clichéd and unexplained plot devices certainly undermines any suspense, particularly when at the end Rage escapes from Bracken by using a portal through time. Convenient. When authors pull rabbits from hats like this, I have to wonder why they worked so hard at convoluted reasons to get to them: why didn’t they simply shoot Bracken instead? They seem so willing to shoot one another elsewhere in the book.

I haven’t even mentioned the Mole People living in underground tunnels, or the Amazonian Shamans and their hallucinogenic sacraments, or the yacht party tear gassed by cops in helicopters. To be fair, the book is a frenetic romp, and if you can accept the wild rhythms and breathless hyperbole, it’s a fun ride, most of the time. Still, the over-the-top language left me uneasy, as if I were watching a white guy in blackface singing Old Man River.

Michel Basilières is the author of Black Bird (Vintage Canada). He teaches writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

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